SHAPE-SHIFTERS: AMERICAN INDIANS

A landscape restoration specialist once remarked that everyone wants the landscape to be restored to what they first encountered. Since landscape is constantly transforming, as a group they can’t agree on what is “right.” One guy’s shocking dandelion invasion is another guy’s field of gold. Something like that happens with populations like Native Americans, who are a succession of generations influenced by time and circumstances. When I first came to Browning, Montana, in 1961, there were several distinct “types” of “Indians.” (One of the things that changes over the years is nomenclature.)

At this point in history, Bob Scriver had created his sculpture to “freeze frame” three generations by portraying three people still living. One was Chewing Black Bone, the Aku Pitzu of James Willard Schultz’s tales and a very ancient man. He had been in a real war party, he had seen the buffalo disappear, he had dressed in buckskin and a Sioux headdress to meet dignitaries, and now he lived in a lodge by his granddaughter’s reservation allotment ranch house. He had survived one of the largest displacements of a people in history, a refugee in time but not in place. His culture had been removed but his location remained.

Mae Williamson was half-assimilated. A Blackfeet speaker, she had been married to a lawyer and was the first woman on the Blackfeet Tribal Council. The boy’s name has been lost. If he is alive today, he is over sixty, a grandfather or great-grandfather. He may be one of those who completed the assimilation to white ways, losing his Blackfeet ways but becoming competent in modern society. I’m sure he still self-identifies as Blackfeet.

In addition to these three groups, I was aware of what we now call “street people,” which is to say hard-core alcoholics, and because of being around off and on for fifty years, I’m aware that though many died, some of these people sobered up and became productive family members again. And I was aware of those who were part of the mostly white manager/shopkeeper/clerical/rancher classes who would send their children to college to become today’s Blackfeet middle class.

In the public mind the “shape” of the American Indian comes from the Prairie Clearances, the huge land-grab that rested on the reservation system, powered by a corps of Civil War veterans suited for frontier war. Horseback, mixing guns with arrows, this picture of Indians is reinforced by indelible art and books mostly created by white men, like “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” which listed the many violences without much nuance. Every time I go to the CM Russell Benefit Auction I run into white men, usually middle-aged but lately older, who can recite amazing amounts of detail and who are emotionally invested in a certain point of view. Clearly they encountered all this at a time of their life when they became deeply invested in a certain way of seeing it.

A boy who came here with his missionary father during WWII tells me proudly his father was a member of the tribe because Chief Bull (Dick Sanderville) gave him an adoption certificate. The fact is that such a ceremony means about the same as a Hallmark greeting card. It is honorable, affectionate, and indicates a wish to stay connected, but it has no legal significance and would not be recognized by any other tribal member or the federal government. Chief Bull was one of two brothers descended from a Mexican family, mixed with Indian, who acted as cavalry interpreters, political leaders, and civil or ceremonial icons in “full buckskins.” But for a small boy, and possibly for a romantic father doing his best for a damaged people, it meant everything to have this relationship. They want to recognize it, valorize it, and keep it in mind. They ought to.

The small Blackfeet boy of those times would have a different “take.” His sons or grandsons may have been exposed to the ideas of the post-modern/post-colonial/redemptionist point of view that declares only genetically descended have the right to describe Indian knowledge. (Well, at least government-confirmed pedigree-descended, since no one had genetic tests and everyone had to go by the commodity rolls first listed by some 19th century clerk with a little table and a dip-pen, trying to get an accurate account of who-was-who out of people who didn’t speak English and only knew that getting one’s name on the list meant food.)

The idea that Indians who write about Indians should be privileged when it comes to publication and authority was a powerful one that fit into the Sixties Counter-Culture resistance to Old White Rich Men Dominating Everything. Women, Blacks, Indians, what is (rather disconcertingly to me) called Queers or GLBTDS (I never get that right), all benefited from a turning of the tables that’s still incomplete. But it created a couple of new “shapes” of Indians. One was the “white Indian” who pretended to be Indian -- maybe casually and maybe so seriously as to take up a 19th century Native American lifestyle -- and the “ultra Indian,” the person who really was enrolled and used that fact not only to write as an Indian, but also to drive white Indians out of the “commodity line” that publishing briefly provided. The very fight to preserve the right created so much uncertainty and so many lawsuits that publishing fled from the trouble.

By now those few decades have been submerged by globalization. We speak of authochthonous or indigenous people of the world and read books by oppressed minorities in Africa, China, the Middle East -- some of them held captive since before the Americas were even known to Europeans, inhumanly ghastly and ongoing today. American Indians of today are mostly baffled by all this. They are used to being privileged by their identity and suffering and don’t always have a strong sense of the planet, though continental alliances, the Pan-Indian movement, is strong and Incas and Aztecs now sometimes attend pow-wows.

Today the Chewing Black Bone patriarch is gone. Even the Mae Williamson/Chief Bull transitional figure is just about gone. The boy probably remains living, but he himself may have changed over the years. I see my former students slipping in and out of guises, according to what will help them survive, because this is what has kept the generations alive. Still, the common denominator is the place, the land, whether or not it is called a “reservation.” It has its own agenda.

I am -- right here before your very eyes -- a white woman writing about Indians. I defend the idea that all people have the right to write about what they know: this place and its people is something I know. Not just that: love. But not paralyzed into some stereotype. Rather, the real and constantly shape-shifting of a real people.

THE SHAPE-SHIFTING MOTIF

Shape-shifting is one of the most universal human phenomena there is and yet we deny it even as we react to it. For instance, consider the changes between conception and birth: from one cell and a second nucleus (which is about all a sperm is: a nucleus with a tail) forms a blastocyst, a tiny ball of cells, and then unfolds from that what some think of as the history of the evolution of mammals: a little critter like a fish, then an amphibian, slowly forming human characteristics until it is ready to survive on its own -- with a lot of help -- outside its mother’s body. We don’t know when it becomes conscious and there is argument over when it becomes human. One can see when it becomes gendered.

Then the infant begins a long arc of shape-shifting called “growing up” and an almost-plateau called “maturity” and then the long slide into aging and death. We don’t know when it stops being conscious and there is argument over whether it goes on being human, just somewhere else.

So that’s one pattern. It seems to me that the very process of being alive causes one to “shape-shift,” mostly centering on the things vital to life. We’ve talked about birth and death. Few talk about eating and excreting. Other cultures do, but Western scholarship is very reluctant to even admit there is such a thing as the latter. Maybe the closest we come is to say someone one is so irreproachable that they shit cold cream. Or that a light shines out of their rearend instead of the darkness others are famous for sticking their heads into. Very rude ideas!

I just watched “Wide Sargasso Sea” which is the invented story responding to “Jane Eyre,” the proper governess of low but virtuous station who comes to the rich Mr. Rochester as a helper and something of a savior. Mr. Rochester has an insane wife kept in a tower room, the archetypal “Madwoman in the Attic,” and Jean Rhys' novel is her imagined story. This Mr. R. is neither rich nor wise, so he accepts a beautiful wife with a big dowry without knowing much about her. In the end this is nearly a selkie story, the tales about men or women who come out of the sea, discarding their sealskins to become human and are captive in marriage because the human who loves them has hidden their skin so they can’t shift back. In Wide Sargasso Sea the woman is creole and her world in Jamaica is as foreign as the sea. Captured and misunderstood, her only route home is through madness and death.

In its mild form this is such a near-universal experience that it powers many contemporary novels. A person marries or enters a romance having certain expectations, certain convictions about the nature of the other person. When those ideas turn out to be wrong, it can seem to be a matter of madness or enchantment. The experience can also work as redemption and then we have “Beauty and the Beast,” which is a script so powerful that way too many people enter upon relationship with the purpose of changing the other person in a redeeming way: kissing the frog, so to speak.

Yet there’s no guarantee that “growing” and becoming educated and wiser and so on -- “improving” -- will preserve the relationship. In fact, change -- ANY change -- is scary.

So we could make a typology: good change versus bad change, a shape-shift that is wanted (maybe even undertaken deliberately) versus one that is forced upon one -- an enchantment or maybe a change necessary to survive or maybe truly a madness. Because we live in bodies, the body may change due to an accident or disease, so the imposed physical shape-shift forces mental and emotional changes because it’s no longer possible to think the same.

There are endless lists and types of shape-shifting in every culture: fairy tales are famous for them, modern fantasy sci-fi is besotted with them, and real-life stories abound. Websites are devoted to them and the discussion of them.

One of the most interesting is a shape-shift into an inanimate being: paralyzed, unable to move, in bondage. Or when a human shifts to an animal and begins to acquire the animal’s mind, losing the ability to think like a human. Our culture’s idea of gender is so rigid that mistakenly relating to a disguised person is a huge plot driver, whether we’re talking Shakespeare or Ellen Degeneres. And the pathos of not just failing to realizing a lover’s true identity but then finding oneself forever separated by the truth is at the heart of West Side Story. Separation by death gives us Orpheus and Euridice. Then the separated person might try his or her own shape-shifting, changing to accompany or stay in relationship with the lover. Maybe the saddest story is “the Little Mermaid,” who changes to be with her human lover -- even though it causes her excruciating pain -- only to realize that he prefers another. It’s all been for nothing. Or has it?

Another important category of shape shifting stories is about the person in danger who becomes someone or something else in order to escape. Sometimes there is a long series of changes in which the pursued changes into something, the pursuer turns into a suitable predator, and the pursuer changes again. In real life this is sort of what happens when a child is abused: they dissociate, become someone else. At the very least they may try to be invisible. Others become defiant saboteurs. Or they may become absorbed into the angry intolerant persona of their abuser.

In the larger social scheme of things a minority group, particularly one that is stigmatized, may take the place of the child, forced into economic niches or ghettos or diasphoras, disguised by a pretended conformity or obedience. In fact, it becomes clear that so many things can be described or analyzed in terms of shape-shifting that a thinker must be careful to sub-divide the category to stay clear-headed. Of course, it’s also possible to proceed in a poetic, free-association way to see where one’s subconscious processes take one. Bound to be interesting.

GOOGLE LOOP

Some of us giggled ruefully over the recent Dilbert comic strip in which the “Topper,” who always exaggerates to a ridiculous degree in order to top everyone else, made an impossible brag and advised skeptics to wait ten minutes, then check Wikipedia. Topper had discovered how to use the hollow backside of a wiki, namely that it is at the mercy of whoever cares to post. Misinformation doesn’t work very well on topics everyone visits -- someone is sure to recognize the post as a fabrication and correct it. But if it’s in a rather obscure corner, it will be overlooked.

Worse, if someone wants to use the website maliciously, they can create a “Google Loop.” This is when a hostile post, supposedly based on some citation which no one ever checks as to validity, gets picked up by the Google search crawler, put on the list about the subject so that it’s visited by someone else who accepts that information uncritically (thinking, “Oh, it’s in print-- must be right”) and cites it on their blog or in an article. Whereupon the Google crawler picks it up again and adds it to the list until one hostile post has been expanded by repetition to what seems like dozens of new posts.

In the professions (doctors, lawyers, ministers, professors) one is required to demonstrate somehow one’s qualifications, how one has mastered a body of knowledge. Exams, certification, boards of review, mentors, and institutions all play their part, but one of the important sources of authority is the citation. We recognize them as footnotes or endnotes, often supplemented by bibliography. The idea is that the person proposing an idea shows on what previous body of thought their argument rests -- how it is validated by what has gone before and how the present contribution builds on that body of thought. Which authorities one cites is a way of situating a writer in the great family tree of knowledge. And if the citations are misquoted or just wrong, that shows the person is not qualified. But someone has to recognize the names and sources.

I met this notion at seminary and was rather offended by it. Being forty instead of twenty, I valued experience in real life far beyond reading, esp. since ministry is presumably about real life people. But the religious studies program at the U of Chicago is meant to prepare professors of religious studies rather than ministers, and so I was over-ruled to the point of near-failing. Theology is about reasoning one’s way through a body of knowledge. (I’m told there is now a growing new discipline of philosophy called “x-philosophy.” (Check out http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/) It seems to be rather like fMRI brain studies as it tries to get past our assumptions to something more, well, REAL.

By now there is so much knowledge and so much of it is specialized, that most of us only register that there are a lot of citations that look important. How can an ordinary mortal tell which matters? Or even a well-educated professional whose basic introduction is now outdated by the enormous shifts in so many fields? To the rescue came the idea of a journal, like the New England Journal of Medicine or JAMA or a host of specialty journals. But their efficacy could only be guaranteed by the diligence and morality of the journal writers and editors and the loopholes began to appear.

One little scam loop has been uncovered by Bob Grant writing in The Scientist, May 7, 2009.

“Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted.

“Elsevier is conducting an "internal review" of its publishing practices after allegations came to light that the company produced a pharmaceutical company-funded publication in the early 2000s without disclosing that the "journal" was corporate sponsored.”

Determined corporate forces are like junior high school students, always feeling around for devious ways to beat the system instead of devoting their energies to straightforward achievement. Innocent but suspicious persons wishing confirmation of salesmens' promotions would find that in these journals, neatly leaping over any necessity for testing. Then new journals quote the phony ones, and the loop completes.

But this doesn’t just happen in the professions, unless you think of publishing as a profession. Publishers have managed to figure out how to convert authors’ efforts into the publishers’ salaries and rent while merely feigning publishing. By constantly requiring more from authors desperate to be published (their desperation is another blog): pay for your own research, provide all illustrations, pay for someone to do the indexing, prepare a detailed advertising plan, secure blurbs from other authors, and so on -- and then deducting all the publisher’s expenses (lunch, haircuts?) from any money earned by the book (noting all the time that the cost of actually printing a book is going up), refusing to offer advances, charging “handling fees” for royalties, and delaying any payment until all copies are gone (“sell through”) -- publishing has become the next thing to a Ponzi scheme.

It becomes a Google loop when critics are persuaded to say either good things about a book (great if you can arrange for it to win a prize) or bad things about a rival publisher’s book. Then that’s cited in a host of theoretically individual judgments of the book from overwhelmed reviewers. It’s best if you can smuggle the book into the news by using some kind of purported sociological tendency, supported by citations in articles, which soon appear in Google, then in footnotes, and then as another round of articles. Properly done, this can cause the ouster of the President of Harvard University. You could Google it. Outraged women whose thinking had been captured by a Google loop, managed to achieve it.

It worked for George Bush when he wanted to invade Iraq. Say something (remember uranium yellow cake?), get someone to quote it, cite that person, put it in an article, an editorial, a blog, and PRESTO! It’s on Google. Pretty soon it’s in Wikipedia.

More discussion here (tip of the hat to Dave Lull):
http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/05/wikipedia-hoax-reveals-limits-of-journalists-research.ars

SO TIM BARRUS IS NASDIJJ -- GET OVER IT!

Years have passed.  Nasdijj is long over, the shadow of a first-person story informed by an author who had lived on the Navajo rez and whose ancestry went back to the Delaware tribal complex generations ago.  It was publishers, publicists, media mongers, who pushed the Navajo identity and then the accusation of misrepresentation based on the nom de plume.  

What’s important now -- after Trump and Covid-19 -- is seeing that Barrus was already living out a previous and still unresolved pandemic when Covid-19 struck.  Sitting by gay friends as they died of AIDS sharpened his determination to do as much good as he could.  He did that until the money ran out.  First was boys in Paris as HIV took hold of them before any effective drugs.  Then Appalachia.

Here’s the strategy.  Choose boys who can respond.  Unite them into a brotherhood.  Let them fall in love with each other and argue all night.  Teach them to read.  Do not criticize their morals but try to convert them to cleanliness and proper eating.  Give them something worth doing:  making videos (the Paris boys already knew), taking photos, becoming computer adept.  Be for them the adult who can fend off other adults.  Be WITH them, even if they hate.  Even if they die.  Even after.

Every pandemic is rooted in poverty, stigma, family breakdown, authoritarian oppression.  Drugs and alcohol are as much results as causes.

Some details in this following essay are wrong.  Barrus may have been born in an East Lansing hospital, but he grew up in a little farm town not far away.  His maternal grandmother's maiden name was Frost.  Not Scandinavian.  There are several wheelchairs in this story and a lot of "Mama Religion."

Barrus had been an editor himself. He published Geoff Mains' novel barely in time for Mains to hold it before he died.  I should probably just delete much of the rest of this post, but there are copies out there, I'm sure.

Barrus publishes now in comments on The New York Times articles and on other websites.  He says that if I tell what I know about him he will send the CIA, FBI, WHO, and the Dogs of War to shut me up.

____________________________________________________________

Okay, reader, see if you can follow this chain of logic.

Timothy Patrick Barrus was clearly an exceptional child -- very intense. He was born in East Lansing (which is different from Lansing) in 1950 before cities were surrounded by suburbs. There were still undeveloped spaces full of brush. His maternal grandparents lived on a farm not far away, near a town called Portland. Other members of his maternal family ran a local theatre and as a child he acted in plays there. Sometimes he played girl’s parts. I’ve seen a photo of him as a miniature Captain Hook. He had dimples.

He had a younger sister. She won’t be mentioned here again.

His father was a shift foreman for electrical engineering for the City of Lansing, a handsome, brilliant, powerful man who was violently abusive, esp. towards his son. He was also seductive, competent, and daring. (Tim’s account -- I believe him.) He was an avid outdoorsman. Working class, which could probably be called lower middle class. Think "The Deerslayer," knotty pine rumpus rooms, "tapestries" of elk. I've seen photos.

In 1978 Tim’s parents moved to Pentwater and his father bought a fishing boat. Maynard was 47. He died of alcoholism and diabetes in 2003. I read the obituary. His mother was a master gardener, worked in a library (not a degreed librarian), died in 2006 of multiple sclerosis. She had been confined to a wheelchair. I read that obituary, too.

As a teenager Tim attempted suicide by blowing his guts out with a shotgun. (It was a “Western” household full of long guns.) He was saved but you can see the scar in photos, at least the frontal one. They say the exit wound is worse. He worked at a grocery store, as a nude model for art classes at the university, doing stoop labor, cooking, cleaning cages in the biology lab, and as an aide in a special ed school. (He says so and I believe him.) With the money he bought a motorcycle and hit the road.

He married young and worked for Headstart, which in Lansing in those days included many Chippewa kids. In Florida he and his wife adopted a foundling, a boy, who was damaged but manageable until a younger sister was born. I’ve seen the photos. He was blonde, much like Tim, and clearly devoted to his father, but eventually went totally out of control. The marriage died. Tim gave the boy back to institutional care, took his daughter, and fled to San Francisco.

He had a Ford Foundation grant in the Year of the Child (1979) to organize and present children’s art for the United Nations. He became part of the counterculture: artist, poet, photographer, activist, performance artist, and writer. Digger, Act Up parades, communes -- he was there. Bought his film from Harvey Milk.

He did write all kinds of pornography/erotics as well as editing magazines and running the Knights Press. He is the founder of the “Leather Lit” category of gay writing, part of the Eighties wave of increasingly sophisticated and skillful gay writing. Leather lit is considered S/M. I can document all this. He wrote a great deal of other stuff under pseudonyms, which is customary among writers of all sorts as well as actors.

Tim married for a second time in San Francisco to a co-worker at a program for autistic boys. His daughter was by now a teenager. I’ve seen the photos. She is married and has a daughter. She teaches overseas for her own safety since both Barrus' wife and daughter have been threatened. I've seen photos of her with a llama and with a penguin.

When the great AIDS plague hit San Francisco, Tim, Tina and Kree went to New Mexico where Tina taught kindergarten and first grade on the reservarion. I’ve seen videos of her teaching, probably among the earliest videos Tim Barrus ever made. I have a book bag from the school and a Navajo rug with a bit of hair shed by Navajo, the dog. Come by the house and I’ll show you. These two years are at the heart of “The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams.” This book contains twenty chapters. Only ONE is the story of the son who died, the Esquire story. (The one right after it, “And The Dreams Came Down Like Thunder in the Rain,” is about Tim’s father.) You’ll be happy to know that the real Tom grew up in special homes and is now middle-aged. Tim is EXTREMELY protective of him. Recently Tom was pursued by paparazzi so that to keep him safe he had to be removed from the place and people he knew.

This one-chapter story is not at all like Sherman Alexie’s story, “What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona.” Sherman Alexie’s writing is NOTHING like Tim Barrus’ writing. Sherman writes jokey stand-up comedian tales while Barrus writes Zane Grey Purple High Drama. Sherman’s plots and characters are like “Pow-Wow Highway” or “Stay Away, Joe.” The former was written by a guy whose Indian credentials were challenged and the latter was written by a white man. As an English teacher who has been on Native American lit internet groups since the Nineties, I cite myself. Sherman badly wanted to write a best-seller.

Interestingly, the story unmasking Tim Barrus in the LA Times Weekly was printed in 2006 at the same time as Sherman Alexie’s essay in Time magazine, almost to the day. Alexie’s movie “Smoke Signals,” based loosely on “What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” was just being released. Sherman Alexie had been asked to comment on Barrus' first book when it was first in galleys in 1999. You can verify this online.

Actually, the content of the Barrus story was closer to the memoir by Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich called “The Broken Cord.” But Dorris was a far more polite and conventional writer. Dorris committed suicide while Barrus was in Navajo country and people there were shocked and very much saddened. If you know Indian reservations, you know that suicide haunts everyone there.

In 2000 when “The Blood Runs Like a River Through my Dreams” was published, it was hailed as brilliant and authentic. If you read
through the reviews (I’ve been through hundreds of them), you see very few of the reviewers have done more than skim the book, or they would have noticed that some chapters are simply essays, occasionally history. When the book was so roundly condemned, it was clear that only the one chapter was referred to, and it was not read -- simply described from other descriptions. It is the second and third books that are presented as memoir. They ARE memoir, but disguised.

IMHO the whole issue of hoaxy memoirs was trumped up to feed an appetite for scandal and misery, like the old True Romance Stories magazines my mother wouldn’t let me read. There have ALWAYS been memoirs of dubious factuality. There have ALWAYS been white people who wanted to be Indians. Since the post-colonial political correctness theories, there have ALWAYS been writers who were attacked by Indians in online flame wars, usually by Indians who were of low-quantum, off-rez, urban origins, striving to make reputations for themselves. Often female. I’ve saved the emails (some people -- including Alexie -- will be chagrined to know) of many of those flame wars. Sherman Alexie was stooping or listening to bad advice from groupies, who included the author of the LA Weekly piece. (I’m guessing now.)

The issue of invented memoirs got mixed up with journalists who were inventing “facts” for the sake of their stories. Journalists do not write memoir. Journalists are supposed to be investigators and are supposed to stick to the facts, like lawyers. Memoir is not journalism. Memoir is an art form. Got that?

Journalism has turned yellow in the last years, pursuing personality above all else. Today in the laundromat I flipped through a stack of that were all about tats, pecs, sex, detox, more sex, babies and whose they were, etc. It’s our norm now. We force everything into that mold.

So all the reviewers who had said the book was brilliant (but secretly hadn’t really read it) now said that the same writing was worthless because it wasn’t written by an ethnic minority. This means that the whole edifice of publishers -- who are supposed to filter what they publish; reviewers -- who are supposed to be able to tell good writing when they see it; professors -- who are supposed to be experts on writing styles; Indians -- who are supposed to be able to tell other Indian writing; PEN -- which is an organization of writers (duh); and post-modern critics who said that writing should be interpreted and judged only on the basis of the writing itself and not the biography of the writer -- all that came crashing down. It was a fantasy.

The several publishers involved all wrote checks, ordered plane tickets, and looked at the passport of Tim Barrus (not Nasdijj). They knew better than he did that memoirs make more money for them than essay collections. The silver lining is that Barrus’ hips had been destroyed by avascular necrosis so he was doing publicity in a wheelchair, but the money from the books paid for his hips to be replaced. I’ve seen photos of him after the surgery. He’s shockingly gaunt. He says the surgery was easy compared to kicking the necessary anesthetic drugs.

Of course, he went right on writing. He can’t help it. That’s one thing he and I have in common. But he switched to videos in addition to print. I’m going to stick to print. Tim is okay now. So is the rest of the family, but the dog Navajo has "gone on ahead." Tim’s new helper dog is Isabella, also a Blue Heeler.

CAN A MINISTER BE AN EMERGENCY RESPONDER?

Why isn’t a minister considered an emergency responder? It appears that Catholic priests still are called when someone is dying -- at least they were called when the Last Rites were considered important as a ceremony for a person crossing over into the dark and unknown land after death. In fact, part of the reason the liturgy was reassigned the title of “Sacrament for the Ill” was that “Last Rites” -- at least partly because of Hollywood -- had acquired so much magical power that if someone truly ill received the Last Rites as a precaution, it might actually “scare them to death.” On the other hand, if someone died without the Last Rites, relatives might be distressed by the idea that the person was liable to go to hell, or at least purgatory. Sticklers pointed out that "Last Rites" were often given AFTER death, which means they aren't "last" but "post."

So it’s mostly Protestant ministers who aren’t called in the event of impending death. In fact, my experience was that people didn’t even want their minister to call on them in the hospital, evidently because they have the idea that one should dress up, present oneself well, put on a front for the clergyperson. One should not throw up, bleed, moan, stink or otherwise make a mess when such an important person comes. This must be a Victorian idea.

Surely it has nothing to do with army chaplains, who are out in the fox hole mud (or sand) with the soldiers, praying for the souls of all present (aren’t they? even the enemy?) and trying to comfort those who are suffering. Or police chaplains who listen to tales of evil that shade back and forth between what is good and right and what is forgivable but also deplorable in the reactions of law-enforcers. Have these situations become so morally ambiguous that no one really wants to address them “in the raw?” Could this have something to do with our discomfort about battle trauma?

I surely don’t have any answers, but it seems to me that in the mainstream denominations that are supposed to be losing members, there aren’t even many good questions being asked. We’ve turned from sacredness to psychology, from the nature of virtue to the nature of propriety, and -- driving it all -- the way to the “good life,” meaning prosperity rather than right action. (Ready for Last Rites, that idea!)

Like physicians, ministers respond to the public (media invented) image, which particularly affects the people who aspire to join the ranks. So if you want to be a rich golfer, the stereotype says, be a specializing dermatologist. And if you want to just hang around a nice office looking friendly, with an easy speaking engagement on Sunday morning, become a minister. Plus, when there’s a potluck you won’t have to bring anything and you’ll get to lead the food line. You’ll only have to associate with nice people, the kind who come to church.

In the case of Unitarian Universalists, that will mean nice people who are well-educated and like to hike in beautiful places. If you have a congregation in Texas or Oklahoma, where people tend to be truly rich, you will receive lovely gifts. One minister even received a sports car! Of course, if you preach against plutocrats you will soon be out on the street. In a strange double image, when I was circuit-riding in Montana in the Eighties, denominational insiders considered me a great pioneer and hero in one context and a total fool, a loser, in another. If I’d had any value, I’d have a big coastal city church -- that was the criterion.

What IS the role of a minister anyway? A PRIEST, now, a priest is in a direct relationship to God that cannot be broken after sacramental vows are taken. It’s MAGIC. A priest is like those wizards in Tolkien or Harry Potter movies. If he (always he) goes bad, he’s REALLY bad, because he’s effective. He changes things and he’s not afraid to deal with death and evil. He has magic potions and incantations, even animal messengers. The Blackfeet understood all this right off, though they didn’t really “get” congregations and denominations. But then, Jesus had neither of those either. There were assemblies of people but there were no exhortations to create a new religion -- Jesus asked people to do what they were already supposed to do according to the existing teaching, pushing back out all that vengeful punishment they had managed to smuggle in. It was later that the magic was added, including tales of miracles.

Today a Protestant congregation is a sort of NGO devoted to networking and maybe doing some good in the world, mostly by lobbying and listening to talks, but also by occasionally serving breakfast at the local shelter for the homeless. So the minister is a kind of CEO of the NGO, not that different from the heads of a national humane society or the ACLU or Amnesty International or the Sierra Club -- in fact, those kinds of organizations are often headed by trained ministers. Not that most ministers are trained in such matters, despite the efforts of the Alban Institute.

There are really two kinds of education for ministers, which don’t appeal to the same kinds of people. One kind is the theologian, what was originally called a “learned minister” and which is probably the source of our idea that ministers live in an ivory tower and never get soiled or shocked by real contact. A big church might support such a person. Some folks think that’s a good role for a genius who is slightly antisocial.

The other kind is the CEO, the maintainer of the organization, who tries to teach the laypersons how to run a decent committee system and pledge drive, who can keep the Religious Education people under control and the Music Program from making Sunday morning into a concert. This sort of person could run the Boy Scouts or an Organic Ag group -- whatever. They tend to have a pretty good grip on psychology and so their sermons tend be be on counseling issues or maybe politics. A small church loves such people and counts on them livening up all the parties with their sparkling personalities. The denomination loves them. The community loves them and wants them on boards.

My original models for ministry were nothing like these. Neither really works for me. The idea that has been sticking in my mind lately is from the Westerns: the mountain man who comes to the camp of his peers or possibly his enemies, and quietly takes a seat in the campfire circle. Doesn’t have much to say, but sees a lot and knows a lot about the world out there in the dark behind everyone’s backs. The question is how much such a person can be or ought to be “magic.” That is, efficacious in emergencies. And please define emergency.

VIOLENT FATHERS

In my usual recalcitrant fashion, even though it’s supposed to be Mother’s Day, I’m writing about Father’s Day. Who is the media to tell me what day it is? Anyway, when it comes to parents, the days are pretty well enmeshed. I’ve been thinking about fathers who beat their sons, which is a problem for mothers, and I’ve been trying to understand how fathers, like my father above with myself and two brothers, would get to the place where they would beat sons. He read us the comics every Sunday so I still hear hear his voice when I look at certain strips.

In my father’s case, he was a spanker -- that is, no stick or belt -- and he was not gender discriminating. I got as many spankings as my brothers. Always vowed I wouldn’t cry, but never could hold out long. Partly it was the humiliation. The last time he lost his temper he dragged me out of the car (for fighting with my brothers) and spanked me on a public highway. If he did that now, other people would probably interfere. I was as big as an adult woman, though only beginning high school, and dressed up. I locked the car door to keep him away from me. After a good deal of stalling which made my father even angrier, my mother unlocked the door.

I have no idea what my brothers thought. They made a transition from fear to anger somewhere in there and joined the Marines at seventeen. None of us talked about my father’s rages. None of us ever lost our reciprocal rage except that my mother managed to suppress it mostly. Anyway my father was a traveling man, only home on weekends. None of our relatives ever knew anything about it and they think I’m lying or at least exaggerating if I talk about it now.

Such a situation is “sticky.” I’m attracted to overtly angry men, but split in a hurry if anger turns to violence. I have an exceptional need to be an “emergency responder,” an adrenaline junkie who tries to match my spiking emotion to competence that justifies and shapes it. But I go a little nuts when nothing happens, when it all gets soooooo noooooormal. On the other hand, I’m a crackerjack sublimator and I can let the syndrome play out in a virtual mind-bounded universe which is a source of writing. Reading and movies are also good.

There is a bunch of redneck motorcycle bums up the street: they beat up their womenfolk until the sheriff intervened. Now the women are gone. I have no intention whatsoever of drawing their notice. I hear them go by on their machines -- that’s all I care to know. My alarms for danger go off early. I believe in prevention, which is why I think about violence.

As I do with everything, I tried googling for research on fathers who beat their sons. It seems clearly related to the biological phenomenon among all animals of throwing out males as soon as they are old enough to be a threat. Wolves are a little more tolerant, if the extra males will help feed the pups. Male lions will kill cubs if they belong to a different sire, so that the female will come back into season and he can start his own cubs.

It’s pretty clear that my father changed when he suffered a frontal skull fracture and concussion in 1948. It was subtle damage, but the structures of the brain behind the forehead are delicate and they are the ones most crucial to human characteristics, like empathy, compassion, ability to work with others, the impulse to protect, and so on. The same thing happened to my brother, except at a slightly different location on his forehead. He was not functional after that, not because of being violent but because of being always inconclusive, never being able to judge or choose, and because of being deeply invested in obfuscation, which mostly took the form of telling wild stories. My movie last night was John Le Carre’s “A Perfect Spy,” and those were the kinds of resourceful tales my brother told.

Another clear source of paternal violence is the social conviction that sons “belong to” fathers, are economic chattel who can be forced to work or be hired out with wages going to the family. My great-uncle’s son, in his eighties, told me about being sent to work for a neighbor without so much as shoes or a lunch. That was seventy-five years ago in rural Dakota. He wouldn’t have thought much of it, except that the neighbor was scandalized.

No doubt psychological boundaries between an overwhelmingly powerful father and his son must shift over a lifetime, especially if the son turns out to be as powerful as the father. Bob Scriver had two actual fist fights with his delinquent teen-aged son: one on the main street of town in front of the show house and a crowd, and the other in the house, where I found the sprays of blood on the walls the next morning. The explanation I got never made sense. The son had been stealing as a misguided way of asserting his own power.

The phrase “I’ll beat it out of him,” comes to mind. The way one beats bad behavior out of a dog or horse. (But does that work either?) Notoriously, fathers over-react to what they most fear in themselves, like homosexuality or incompetence. What would be wrong with “son whispering?”

Once I called a father to tell him about his son who was misbehaving and defiant in the classroom. The father said, sighing, “Well, okay. I’ll beat him again. But I doubt it will do any good.” It didn’t. I don’t know where we got the idea that beating anyone would change their behavior. Was it the mothers who put discipline over onto the fathers? (“Wait until your father gets home!”) Was it all those English schools and early American schools that believed in “caning?” Is it an expression of ignorance and, therefore, frustration?

I did find one study of men on steroids that described “roid rage” as a possible cause of violent behavior. Some feminists would chant “testoterone poisoning” -- as good a theory as any. And since families would inherit their hormone levels, a big dominant father is bound to run into a big dominant son. If they have the same values, things might go well, an alliance. If they don’t, one or the other must win the war or leave. If it lasts long enough, it’s likely to be the son who wins because even the most powerful men must age. But if the son loves his father, what can he do but leave?

Very hard on mothers. I haven’t seen any good writing about what they should do, esp. if they are economically dependent, isolated from others, or emotionally enmeshed. It’s fiction material, but I’d like to see some insightful psychological material.

PANSIES AND SLAM BOOKS

It’s the kind of day most of the country had in April -- on the cold side, rainy as in pouring hard for a few minutes -- then slacking off, gray sky. A good day for naps, even more so since last night was what they call “the planting moon,” meaning the full moon more or less close to when a person ought to plant. But not here. The date of our last frost is not due for another week or so and you couldn’t really count on it even then.

Someone gave Pansy two flats of, well, pansies yesterday and she passed some of them on to me. I risked leaving them out on the front stoop on top of the pots I’ll eventually put them in. Their sweet little turned-up kitten faces are getting well-watered, I think. In the house I’m pondering the wisdom of turning up the floor furnace. Maybe after I take a bit of a nap.

Last night was clear and bright, so the cats were out on the prowl until after midnight, then came to slip under the covers because their feet were cold -- yow! When we had all drifted off to sleep nicely, there was some kind of giveaway odor or sound from the kitchen and the bed exploded. CATS ON ATTACK! It was that black cat who slips around here sometimes and occasionally seizes the chance to get at the cat food dishes. Maybe it was left behind when the old man on the back of the block went into a nursing home. No one lives there anymore and you couldn’t really say it was “his” cat anyway. It’s just one of the creatures that takes refuge under that old deserted trailer.

The Squib wouldn’t come back to bed. I left the garage light on, which proved an effective deterrent to black cats, but now the neighbors will be asking for days why my garage light was on. It’s a quiet life here, but observant.

I’ve been reluctant to sign up for all the “friend” list websites. You know, where you designate people to be your friends and then they put you on THEIR list and somewhere there is an aggregator web crawler that is accumulating all the info, so that somewhere there is a marketer or a bureaucrat saying, “Hmmmmm.” Yesterday it was a woman who had taught with me during my brief adventure with the Cut Bank Schools, proposing that we be friends on a book list site. I declined. The less I have to do with Cut Bank the better it suits me. I’ll shop at their Albertson’s and that’s about the extent of it. It’s a small, corrupt, obsessed, never-gonna-be town that sucks blood off the reservation. Think I’m too harsh? I’m being kind.

Anyway, a marketer would have a tough time getting any sense out of my “friend list” if I made them a list of my real friends. They have nothing in common with each other except maybe me. Since I signed up to “monetize” my blog, I’ve been learning more about how others see me. One man wanted to exchange lists -- he runs a dog kennel. I’ve already forgotten what the woman yesterday wanted to exchange about. Some refuse to tell. I wondered what ads the pop-up computer would assign me, which is part of the reason I signed up. For me, curiosity is a far greater motivator than greed.

Most people are the opposite, I think. They aren’t very curious about anything except whether their neighbors are somehow getting richer than they are and how. The Chamber of Commerce might approve of that, but to me it all smacks of those junior high school slam books. Remember those? A notebook has numbered pages and in the back there’s a numbered list of the other kids, usually girls. Each page is entitled something like: “Worst hair in the class,” “Most offensive bad breath,” or “Who should force their parents to get them braces for their teeth.” All the stuff junior high girls think is important. Then there are the numbers of the coded kids who are being judged. It’s supposed to be anonymous and therefore a safe way to attack and gossip. Like blogs.

Sometimes pomo criticism and all the post-whatever politically incorrect stuff seem pretty similar. Instead of becoming a means of consciousness-raising and a thought puzzle about strategies for moving on beyond stereotypes and old grievances, it just turns into a kind of slam book. This is out, this is in. It must come from not being able to move beyond high school education’s categories and lists to principles and patterns. I think this is why Obama is invisible to so many people.

People who can’t be figured out, who are using information and ideas one doesn’t suspect exist, will always threaten the people whose world consists of one location, one kind of people -- mostly the kind on television, who are puppets, robots, controlled by marketers. Soap bubbles. If you haven’t survived them popping once already, it’s a lot harder when the world takes a major shift -- as most people will agree it just has.

I had warning. All my life I’d believed in some secret way that I would write a great book, funny and wise, that would redeem my blunders and make everyone love me the way they did when I was, three or four. I did not expect the publishing world to just disappear. In some ways it was far more disconcerting than finding out I just wasn’t that red-hot a writer anyway and whether or not people loved me, it would NOT be the way they did when I was a pre-schooler and it would NOT have anything to do with a book I wrote. It was plate-tectonics, continental drift, global warming, and the collapse of the world’s economy.

So I have a little sympathy for the people of the dominant culture around here who had really believed that George Bush was a nice guy, therefore a good president, and doing all the right things. I’d say the reaction to being in May, past the first hundred days of Obama, was still shock. But anger -- maybe even rage -- is beginning to thaw it. A little scary.

I do not want a friends list. I do not want an enemies list. I’m going to take naps and plant pansies. Maybe I’ll go out in the garage and burn some sticks.

EMERGENCY RESPONDER BLOGS

The original idea of the “web blog,” from which the term “blog” evolved as a contraction, was to keep a record of websites one visited. In a sort of cross between bookmarking and reviewing, one used the new ability to use a pre-formatted website (free!) to suggest other places to visit. Since then there has been an explosion of these new “blogs,” all commenting on each other. It was a can of worms -- in a good way. So keeping a log with url bookmarks was a way of sorting worms and recommending them to your “fishing” friends.

This is a blog in the classic mode: a list of blogs that I like to visit, though lately I’ve been so busy turning out print for its own sake that I’ve not been visiting these “places” as much as I once did. And I’ve bookmarked so many url’s that I’ve rather lost track of what’s what. Still, I had a few categories that I kept better maintained, mostly because I visited them often. Below is the bookmark list from my category of emergency responders.

Working as an animal control officer put me right up against the whole issue of damage to mammals, including humans. The first question you get at 911 is “are there any injuries?” In Montana that includes livestock. To humans, suffering flesh is the ultimate emergency and we respond to calls for help as quickly as we can. Which sort of answers part of the question about why there is pain -- it’s because people will respond to it with help.

Law enforcement is the main emergency responder, with the fire department a close second. In my childhood there were no EMT’s because the doctor lived a few blocks away and he just came over with his black bag. But by the time my mother died in 1999 there were two different EMT companies standing at the front door fighting over who got to take the call. Animal control officers grew out of sheriff’s departments, a rural entity, and have run headlong into humane society investigators, an urban entity. Very awkward.

I’m sure the Superman/Clark Kent model of hero came out of emergency response. Most of the time the responder is Clark Kent, a desk jockey trying to keep order through bureaucracies like traffic monitoring, licenses, inspections, and so on. But now and then the responder must become Superman, able to outwit murderers, bank robbers, and all kinds of violence. Death itself. This combination of demands is pretty hard on most humans, who have a hard time switching from one mode to the other.

The list below is certainly not definitive, or even indicative, but they are writers I really enjoy reading. I’ve never found an animal control blog nor have I picked up any veterinarians nor have I looked for fire departments. After all, I’m hard-pressed to keep up with my own self-imposed blog goals and it would be easy to wander off into these real life narratives and opinions.

I think I enjoy the ones that are quite different in politics and culture from myself more than the ones who might be like me, but the truth is that not so many people like me go into emergency responder jobs. It was only an accident that I did. It’s just that there ARE some people well-suited for these jobs who, thankfully, are willing to reflect on what happens to them, what strategies worked, what it told them about human beings. At the very least there are a zillion stories here.

In the end these blogs are more interesting and useful than J.G. Ballard’s poeticizing and philosophizing of violence in a book like “Crash.” His experience of the reality was, after all, just one war and a few car accidents. For most of these bloggers, the war and the accidents never end.

http://thelawdogfiles.blogspot.com/
This is a down-south lawman who loves his gun and is waaaaay to the right politically. He’s full of piss ‘n vinegar, opinions and cop jargon. I love him.

http://medicscribe.blogspot.com/
Here’s a member of a community of EMT’s who respond to life-threatening emergencies and occasionally accidentally kill someone, which really pisses this guy off. He lists a lot of the books by EMT’s. How come ACO’s (Animal Control Officers) aren’t turning out the books? All we ever get is bleeding heart humane society stuff -- which sells exceedingly well.


http://phillydan.spaces.live.com/PersonalSpace.aspx?_c02_owner=1
A big part of the fascination of this EMT stuff is the gizmos. This guys knows all about gizmos and gives lots of recommends.

http://aflightmedicsjournal.blogspot.com/
Closed to intruders. The other fascination about emergency responders is the sense of a tight community that doesn’t let just anyone in.

http://shrinkette.blogspot.com/2005/07/grand-rounds-42.html
Written by a female psychiatrist who stopped posting years ago, but it’s still intriguing to see behind the curtain.

http://www.defrance.org/
Big commercial aggregator. Yawn.

http://www.crustyambulancedriver.blogspot.com/
This guy has a mordant sense of humor and a bigger heart than he gives himself credit for.

http://gruntdoc.com/
Short and snappy -- a Texas former military guy.

http://randomreality.blogware.com/blog
A sophisticated English version, remarkably similar to Yanks.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/
Quite sophisticated biology blog. You’ll find out what a pharyngula is.

http://blog.vitummedicinus.com/
Brisk and thoughtful doctor at war with gadgets and homeopaths.

http://injectingsense.blogspot.com/
About Autism Spectrum Disorders. Not medical -- just discussion.

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/
This appears to be to be a medical columnist giving overviews. You can sign up to get emails.

http://blueridgemedic.blogspot.com/
A mellow guy who lives in a gorgeous place and is just beginning to teach EMT stuff.

http://www.rockymountainmedic.blogspot.com/
A Denver EMT who writes “purple” but intriguingly. He’s evidently stopped.

http://surgeonsblog.blogspot.com/
I actually know someone who knows this guy, who’s in Seattle. He’s stopped posting here, but there’s a link to his new blog. This old one really suits me and I don’t even mind rereading old posts. What does it feel like to put your hand into someone’s guts? He’ll tell you.

http://ambulancedriverfiles.blogspot.com/
This guy’s life is part sit-com, part stand-up comic, and often quite a lot of romantic tragedy. But he HAS lost a lot of weight.

http://urbanparamedic.blogspot.com/
Here’s a Boston liberal military guy. How many of THOSE can there be?

http://distractible.org/
The kind of thoughtful guy I’d love to have for a doc.

AUNT TILDY: A Short Story

The little village of Twenty Mile is about twenty miles from McKinley, or it used to be before McKinley grew out that way. Twenty miles was about as far as a team and wagon can travel in a day, at least comfortably, so there was a little mercantile store there, not much more than a provisioner but also a post office, more by evolution than by design. The post office is gone now. Caused a major fuss when it was closed because people hate to lose evidence of their pasts even when they’re over and done with.

My aunt Tildy was the clerk for a very long time, which wouldn’t have been remarkable except that she was blind. It was the neatest little trading post you ever saw, because otherwise she couldn’t find anything. Of course, the mail was a bit of a problem, because you have to read the addresses on the envelopes, and regular postmasters sort them into alphabetical pigeon holes, according to the names of the people. But Tildy had just two big pigeon holes: IN and OUT. People could pick out their own in-coming letters. Or sometimes they’d see something that belonged to a neighbor and deliver it on the way back home. It’s not as though there were very many.

Of course, everyone read the postcards -- well, them as could read. Tildy had sensitive enough fingertips to feel whether there were stamps on the envelopes. She had to be a little careful about it because otherwise she might have to buy a stamp herself, and though they were only pennies, she didn’t have pennies to spare.

In fact, her clothes were always a little startling. She was neat and clean and the patterns were pretty standard, but women made their own clothes in those days and she would use up the material left on the bolt after most of it was sold. Sometimes the color combinations were pretty bold. Not that she needed to dress very special anyway. About the only place she ever went was to the church four miles away. She had an old mule who was remarkably gentle and she could saddle him up by feel. The mule knew the way.

The church was a good one and they had hired an eloquent and handsome preacher. He was a single man and that kept everyone’s attention, in order to see who could catch him. Tildy loved him. Once they had a big shindig, a wedding for a rancher, and everyone came from miles around. They stayed dancing and -- truth be told -- doing a little drinking until way into the night. When it was nearly dawn, they laid out all the food again and finished it off.

The teenagers looked sly on the way home but no one realized why until their wagons pulled into their yards. The babies had all been put to sleep in the backs of the wagons while the grownups had their fun. The teenagers, who weren’t even called teenagers then, had quietly undressed all the babies and re-dressed them in other baby’s clothes, switching them to different wagons, so gently that not one baby woke up or cried out. It wasn’t until the mothers took a good look by daylight that they realized what had happened and faced the rather grim fact that they would have to turn right around and go back, losing another day’s work and tiring the horses further. There were no telephones. It was years before the ringleaders confessed.

Neither the minister nor Aunt Tildy had to attend that second meeting to exchange babies so no one saw them at the little store that day, talking so intently. No one saw them embrace. The minister had decided to resign in order to go back to school for a higher degree and he proposed to Aunt Tildy. He said that if she could wait for him a year, then after he had gotten his advanced degree and a better church somewhere, he would write for her to come to him. He’d send train fare.

Of course, he wrote back to Tildy while he was at that advanced school and, of course, the letters had to be read to Tildy since she was blind. People were willing to do it and, anyway, curious to know what their minister said. The truth was that they had NOT wanted him to leave. They loved him and were used to him and were really quite angry that he deserted them for such a foolish pursuit as a higher degree. What use WAS such a thing, anyway? But they helped Tildy write back.

Then it dawned on them that as the year completed its circle they would lose Tildy as well. Much discussion about the situation resulted. Some of the single women were jealous and wanted to write to tell Tildy’s minister that she was marrying someone else. The older women said that Tildy, being blind, might never get another offer and should have such a chance to better herself as this one was. The younger women retorted that the handsome minister was just wasted on a woman who couldn’t even see him and anyway, she didn’t dress properly. She would embarrass a minister, who had to keep standards.

The men didn’t quite know what to think but they felt there was nothing anyone could do about it. The teenagers hearing that could not resist the temptation to interfere. It was the same ones who had mixed-up the babies. Of course, they knew when the letter with the train ticket in it was likely to come and they managed to intercept it. They burned the letter and gave the train ticket to an abused boy so he could run away, good and far away.

Once someone caught Tildy smelling the letters, hoping to find one that smelled like the minister. He sent more letters, which were a nuisance to spot and remove, but gradually he stopped. Of course, they made sure none of Tildy’s letters got out, though a couple of soft-hearted girls cried when they read them. Then came a postcard from Europe. Then nothing more.

One day the old mule died. Not long afterward Tildy died, too. The boy who had used the train ticket intended for her had managed to get back east to a small city where he found a job and a sweetheart. When his mother wrote to tell him about Tildy, his conscience got to him. He sent a letter with the whole story to the newspaper. At his new church, the minister subscribed in order to keep up with old friends. When he read the story and told his wife, they both wept, he for grief and she for secret gratitude. Then they prayed together.

Then the minister’s daughter was born, he wanted to call her Tildy but his wife refused. Finally, he named his beloved dog Tildy.

REFLECTION ON A REVIEW OF A REVIEW OF GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

“Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life” by Gerald Martin.
“The magic of Gabriel Garcia Marquez": A Review by Marcela Valdes,” the books editor of the Washington Examiner.

(This whole review was in the LATimes. I just want to pick out some quotes to note but I got the review through a forward from Powells, so I don’t have an url.)

"Everyone has three lives," Gabriel Garcia Marquez once told Gerald Martin. "A public life, a private life and a secret life." I would add to those three a virtual life so deep that it is in the developed structure of the brain. I’ve never read any Marquez, partly because so many Boomers -- including my younger brother -- have tried to MAKE me read his books, esp. “One Hundred Years of Solitude”

Here’s the fame of that book caused: “One night, as they attended a theater performance, a spotlight flicked on and followed them to their seats. "Bravo!" someone yelled. "For your novel!" another woman chimed in. A moment later, the entire theater was on its feet and gave the 40-year-old a spontaneous ovation. "At that precise moment," a friend recalled, "I saw fame come down from the sky, wrapped in a dazzling flapping of sheets, like Remedios the Beautiful, and bathe Garcia Marquez in one of those winds of light that are immune to the ravages of time. "”

Well, that’s why some of us write. How can we help wanting to sail before “winds of light”? And yet, we are the same person before and after writing a book. What is it that people react to?

Other Marquez books include: Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), A Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Love in the Time of the Cholera (1985), The General in His Labyrinth (1989) and his 2001 memoir, "Living to Tell the Tale." “As Martin observes, ‘he has told most of the well-known stories about his life in several different versions, all of which have at least an element of truth.’ It has been Martin's Herculean labor to unearth the real story.”

Why do we so lust after “the real story” when the message of the writing is that a person has multiple lives, depending on how you look at it and from which point in time and from which person’s perspective? There ARE some things we can pin down: birth place, education, work history, relatives.

“‘Gabo’ was born in 1927 in Aracataca, a small town of fewer than 10,000 (mostly illiterate) people in the Banana Zone of Colombia.” That might be useful information if you knew what Aracataca was like by visiting there and talking to the people. But how many stereotypes immediately leap to mind after reading the phrase “mostly illiterate” or “Banana Zone”? We don’t think of these places as the birthplaces of authors.

“The key person in his life was his maternal grandfather, Nicolas Marquez Mejia, a prosperous jeweler who fought in Colombia's most devastating civil war, the War of a Thousand Days (1899-1902), and rose to the rank of colonel. (He was also famous for crafting little gold fish.)” A jeweler/soldier is indeed a unique combination of assumed characteristics. Was it attention to detail that united the two roles, or an understanding of value, or worldly awareness? “Little gold fish.” I’d love to see photos.

“Gabo lived with him until he was 9, when his long-suffering mother and his erratic, philandering father swooped down and reincorporated him into their impoverished, peripatetic nuclear family.” Having an idyllic life that is then broken off seems to be a good way to create an artist of some kind, who will forever try to recapture those early images of happiness. Yearning for a lost past, esp. when the break comes when one is still a child, just at the point where scientists tell us the human brain is taking a leap forward in complexity and awareness, pulling in a massive integration of forces at that time, is a powerful experience. Probably it is “organic,” recorded in the structure of the brain.

“The magic, Martin reveals, came from Gabo's grandmother, Tranquilina, a superstitious woman who organized her daily activities according to "atmospheric signals": thunder, black butterflies, dreams, passing funerals. Thus, little Gabo was nursed on opposing philosophies, his grandfather's ‘worldly, rationalizing sententiousness’ and his grandmother's ‘other-worldly, oracular declarations. ‘” The reconciliation of paradoxes can drive a person to deeper, or higher, more meta-level thinking. It’s interesting that these two forces, present always in most human thought, are gender-assigned in this way. (For Louisa May Alcott it was the father who was the dreamer and the mother who was a practical realist.)

The reviewer picks out his “hostile relationship with his father, his early introduction to prostitutes (at age 13), his experience as a brilliant scholarship boy in frayed hand-me-down suits, and his chivalric courtship of Mercedes (which lasted more than a decade and began when she was 9 years old).” I don’t how unusual these experiences are. I see them repeated in European movies all the time.

There’s more. I was reading this having just read J. G Ballard’s sequel to “Empire of the Sun,” which is called “The Kindness of Women,” and then have begun “Crash” which is represented as a meditation on carnegraphic relationship between humans and machines -- merged by brute force and erotic possession. Clearly his interest in the problem and his unique approach come out of his biography: plane crashes, bomb impacts, murders, and then in civilian life forever-after a near-magical obsession with car crashes. Ballard was interned at about the same age as Marquez being removed from his grandparents.

I’ve always been interested in this age, just before adolescence which fascinates us so much, but when I tried Googling about it, I didn’t find much. There is something about the smooth-bodied child who can think like an adult that grips our imaginations. It is about that time we form our aspirations: “hoping for fame to come down from the sky, wrapped in a dazzling flapping of sheets, to bathe us in one of those winds of light that are immune to the ravages of time.” Maybe to blow us back to the pearly world where we were cherished. But we never admit that. It’s part of our most secret lives. We might not even let ourselves know.

EARLY KOZY KAMP

An important West Coast distributor for the Kozy Kamp company.





This was an extremely glamourous sale to the Famous Gorman Family Circus, which mostly specialized in rope twirling, very popular in the Thirties!







The Kozy Kamp was an invention of my grandfather, Sam Strachan, who made and sold them in Portland, Oregon, just before World War II. When I posted photos earlier ("How to Put Up a Kozy Kamp"), some contemporary aficionadoes appeared, much to the surprise of the family! So here are some more very early Kozy Kamp photos.

THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER: A Review

The Return of the Soldier is a “modernist” -- meaning that it responds to new thinking of a hundred years ago -- novel filmed in a contemporary way -- well, a “Masterpiece Theatre” way. By that I mean excellent actors and lots of space in which to think -- which doesn’t really work unless the story gives you something to think about. Luckily, this is philosophical story-telling, a romantic (involving love) moral reflection. The dilemma is not new -- it’s basically the problem of amnesia, years lost out of an identity -- and yet it IS new. We’ve all been reflecting about battle-induced post-traumatic stress syndrome, which is what this amnesia is, as well as a new idea that the right chemicals in the right place at the right time can quite totally erase memories in a way that makes them forever inaccessible. Should that be done to spare a person a terrible and debilitating memory?

The psychological part is important in this story: amnesia as a way of ducking out on obligations and an unhappy life. What will jar a person’s mind into remembering, even if they don’t want to? And, of course, the shadow behind the amnesia problem is what to do if a life is a mistake, a miserable script you don’t want to follow anymore, esp. in a time and place where honor and status are everything.

So Alan Bates is a big vital man traumatized in battle who doesn’t remember his wife. Instead he remembers two earlier relationships: one a happy childhood friendship with his cousin and the other a romance ended before the war, seemingly over class differences. So we have a set-up meant to represent this man worth caring about and three women who care about him but who are bound to have different opinions about what ought to happen to him.

Julie London is the beautiful but petulant and childish wife. Ann-Margret is amazingly the mousy cousin who sees and understands everything, though no one appreciates her. Glenda Jackson is the rock-solid lower-class woman of the ended romance. The wife wants everything back the way it was, no matter the cost, even if she has to tolerate the previous lover. The cousin balances and waits, half-hoping that this man will turn to her and finally realize how much she loves him. (Cousins have been known to marry.) The former lover takes the moral task seriously -- what is the RIGHT thing to do, in spite of her returning love for this man. Her husband is the most patient and generous one of all.

Enter the psychiatrist, a not entirely likeable or trustworthy fellow, who is interested in the women’s points of view and trying to work out a solution that will help his patient, including just leaving him alone. The poor officer seems to be a passive victim who cannot help loving this plain but strong woman from his past. She had discovered that he had not broken off with her as she thought. Her family had moved and his letters to her had not been delivered. It appears that the love was true and that it ended by mistake. Will all concerned realize this and the lovers begin again? Or would the difference in class prevent a happy marriage now just as it would have then?

Throughout there has been a mysterious nursery which the wife enters as her private domain in intimate moments. When the soldier tries the door, exploring the upstairs rooms, it is locked. His wife is within, resentfully smoking. Earlier she has remarked that the nursery should have been dismantled but the soldier wouldn’t permit it. We don’t get the story at that point. In fact, we never see the soldier in the nursery.

Finally the secret comes out: there had been a small son who died. In fact, the Glenda Jackson character had also had a small son who died. Now the moral problem is not one of love but of grief. This amnesia has relieved the soldier of his war trauma maybe -- though he’d had some flashbacks-- but it has also removed the memory and grieving for his son.

Now the wife seems to want to deny and hoard her own feelings about that child, not share them with her husband. Or else nothing touches her. The cousin again balances. It is the Glenda Jackson character who says that one MUST accept the grief over a lost child, that one isn’t complete without that. Lost love affairs are one thing, but a lost child is a morality of an entirely different order. So she’s the one who agrees to go tell him.

The point is not the sweeping away of the amnesia. We watch the moment from a faraway upstairs window with the wife and cousin, so that the recovery of memory is entirely mimed by body language as the soldier “returns” to the house. Up close we see the reactions of the two women: the wife pleased, almost gloating, that she has her husband back; the cousin, stabbed to know what pain awaits the soldier -- something beyond a battle wound. We don’t have to be told what the sturdy and self-disciplined former lover feels now, but we are relieved that she goes home to a thoughtful and supportive husband.

Now I’ve told you the whole plot and you won’t even have to rent the movie, but nevertheless it’s worth watching for the nuance and implications as the story unfolds. The choices are always against high drama or predictability, but they are always full of veracity and attention, which is more than one can say about a lot of movies.

But wait, on a second watching new things pop up. The movie begins with a dream in which the cousin imagines herself as a child on the battlefield. The Captain, also a child, ungallantly picks up a stick and “shoots” her, but she declares she’s not dead. SHE picks up a stick and “shoots” him -- horrifyingly, he explodes. What does THAT mean? And what does it mean when the wounded soldiers in the coffee shop, who seem to know him, curse him and say he was worthless? Wasn’t he a hero? Isn’t it always the heroes who suffer from heroic amnesia? In the end all three women know and still want him. If he weren’t Alan Bates . . . would we?

METHODIST BLACKFEET PARISH HISTORY Part 3

1945 - 47 Stephen C. Smith

In the post WWII years, the discovery of oil under the reservation made everyone giddy with the expectation that they would all become wealthy just as the Oklahoma Indians had. Even the whites expected to profit from the boom and in their imaginations, they decided they didn’t need to be a mission anymore. Therefore Stephen C. Smith declared they were autonomous and even turned back a $300 Board of Missions check!

Smith said: “My feeling right along since I am here is that this work has been misrepresented to your board. The local Protestants are mostly whites. . . The Indians are at least 80% Catholic and we have little chance in making any more progress with them than we have in the past. The continued acceptance of gifts for Indian work does not meet with my personal approval.”

Smith saw three possibilities: 1) the Methodists could simply get out, surrendering the church property to some other denomination (Harrod doesn’t say whether anyone considered some pan-Protestant community entity), or 2) simply admit they were a white church and drop the mission component, or 3) a second minister specifically trained for mission work could be hired to work independently.

He said, rather fiercely, “My own feeling is that mission money should be spent in areas where progress can be made. This is one area where money can better spent elsewhere.” He was in favor of shock therapy: “I feel very strongly that the local group could shoulder all expenses, or nearly all, if they were made to. A sudden jolt makes the boing hard at first, but it will make for a finer work in the future.”

The result of Stephen Smith’s fierceness was paralysis. J.H. Harris told Oscar Doane in a letter dated April 17, 1959, that over $60,000 had been spent to supplement the pastor’s salary and to maintain the church. Somehow no oil money flowed. Miss Bernice Jackson, a Mohawk, undertook a program of Christian leadership which showed that the white officials had not understood that educated Indians from back East were not necessarily welcome among Blackfeet supersensitive to being patronized.

One Smith was replaced with another, Edgar B. Smith.


1947 - 1954 Edgar Bernard Smith and family

(This postcard was found by a person in New England who returned it to the Browning parish.)

Edgar Smith felt more of a missionary impulse. In 1952 there was an effort to start quilting project and three sewing machines were bought. The church continued to receive bales of old clothes. At the conference level the denomination didn’t want to give up the missionary aura. They went back to the idea of morning services for dressed-up whites and evening services for blanket Indians, now rather scarce.

1954 summer Paul Hollenbeck
This person is not discussed by Harrod and is not listed in the index. Probably he was a student or lay person who “held the fort” over the summer transition period.

1954-56 George Ritchey
Ritchey was evidently a standard “white bread” Methodist minister. The Presbyterian church had closed, giving their property to the Methodists. Now the former Presbyterian meeting house was sold for $4,660, to be a private dwelling. The money was immediately put into building the Sunday School and social hall, plus a bit of interior remodeling. These were the baby boom years and there was considerable demand for family events.

Minutes report: “Since the arrival of the Ritcheys, there has been a 300% increase in regular church attendance at Browjning and a one-third increase in Sunday School attendance. financial gains reflect the same general increase and enthusiasm. Membership Training Classes are now being conducted. The Indian Committee of the Conference has purchased $812.50 worth of new furniture, and the Browning Woman’s Society of Christian Service has added $325 in new furniture and upkeep."

Along in here somewhere, Bob Scriver left teaching in the Browning school system music program and was replaced by Don Schmidt. Schmidt turned out to be a limited teacher but a gifted organist and is was probably about this time that the electronic organ was acquired, a huge jump in formality and elegance. For the following decades Don and Kathryn Schmidt were pillars of the Methodist church in many ways while making their living through photography and a small shop on the highway through Browning.

The Church Ranch, which was the acreage on Willow Creek where the Methodist church building and parsonage originally stood, had to be used for the benefit of the Blackfeet Indians or they would lose their title to it. Allen Wilcox had a proposed a Folk School. Edgar Smith thought about truck farming, sheep raising, and dairying. The land was flood plain, best suited to being a source of gravel, but no one wanted a gravel pit. Finally it was leased for pasture and the money devoted to the church budget, by now a largely white church. But the Board of Missions, a different denominational internal organization, was legally entitled to the money. Blackfeet enrolled persons were beginning to mutter about their own entitlements.

Harrod, writing in the Sixties and Seventies that were preoccupied with justice in terms of poverty and race discrimination, was of the opinion that the denomination didn’t put enough effort into trying to save the church from being dominated by white members. He tended to be sympathetic to the ministers who -- after all -- had to get through their days without losing the members of whatever kind.

Harrod says little about the remaining ministers except for Jim Bell, whom he found sympathetic. I arrived in 1961 and served as an interim in 1988-89. I’ll try to assemble some memories in the next post.

1956-58 George P. Cox
1957 - summer Dave Olson (intern) Babb, Heart Butte
1958-59 Charlotte Bridges
1959-67 James E. Bell Babb, HButte
1963 - Harry E. Pearson Blackfeet United Methodist Parish (lay)
1965- 68 Conrad Himmel
1963-64 Richard D. Fiero Heart Butte

BROWNING UNITED METHODIST PARISH
1974-1981 Walter F. Mason
1981-93 F. Richard and H. Marine
1983-1985 James R. Bentley (PM)
1986-87 Ron Barr
1987 - 88 Mary Scriver
1989 Richard (Jake) Jacobson
1989 -90 Peggy Salois
1990- 1994 Donna Lee Martin
1994 - 1998 Rowland Freeman

WHAT IS THIS ROMANTICISM STUFF?

Though It’s far from deliberate -- or maybe just unconsciously deliberate -- I seem to be exploring post-industrialism as romanticism. Lots of little propositions pop up as I read or watch movies, and then I spend the day reflecting on them. For instance:

Of all the unlikely sources, H-NILAS (the humanities listserv, more formally, “Nature in Literature and Story, ” which has been part mythologizers and part humane society, suddenly began to respond to a published paper arguing for the re-organizing or abolishing of disciplines in universities. The posts came fast and furious, arguing against any change versus arguing for the proposition that the Big Change has already happened (thanks to the genome, the New Physics, the Internet, et al) and all we can hope to do is clean up. The conversation often echoed the controversy over saving the Detroit automakers with all that entails, like the death of communities and the sweeping away of contracted benefits that people spent decades in assembly-line slavery to secure.

While they were arguing against universities (I agree with those who say they are already gone, replaced by corporation superstructure and adjunct faculty), I ran across a claim that “high school” was an industrial revolution invention, meant to produce workers educated enough to operate with an instruction manual and able to work in teams. (Maybe thus supporting the monster athletic programs that eat school budgets.) The idea was that running machinery or small businesses is no longer the “spine” of the economy -- they have been replaced by technology. Since the kids know more about the technology than any adults do, why should the adults be standing in a classroom lecturing? And if kids are too dumb and/or unmotivated to teach themselves, the hell with them. Not even the army wants them. Let them be drug mules. Or hustlers. (The only person who has managed to industrialize sex was Kinsey.)

Parallel and underneath these major social changes -- which admittedly are mostly happening in G-something countries -- is a new romantic movement, expressionist in a technological way. I’m talking YouTube. Shameless, inventive, constantly changing, private in a public way. Exactly suited for young people who feel there is no future for human beings on this planet, let alone themselves. Just as they felt before WWI and then again between the World Wars and when facing the Atomic Scare of the Fifties. They challenge our “old, tired ethics” and deplore the cruelty of the pointy-pencil-people who kill millions with their spreadsheet analysis of corporate greed, justifying the denial of compassionate aid, let alone basic health safety nets.

I’m reading J.G. Ballard, enticed along by Jeremy Biles’ essay on Sightings, which put a U of Chicago Div School philosophical spin on Ballard’s sci-fi social crit. Biles is an artist rather than a divine, a Ph.D. rather than an M.Div. Ballard, whom I know mostly from the movie of “Empire of the Sun,” had been through the kind of experience that creates either a Langdon Gilkey, not QUITE outside the pale, or a Ballard -- a sci-fi horror-meister who makes Cormac McCarthy look childish. (Both Gilkey and Ballard were interned in Shanghai during WWII. Gilkey was one of my professors in Chicago.) If a person sat down and read the complete works of Ballard and Gilkey, it would take a long time and the reader would stand up at the end transformed.

Two back-to-back movies -- “Youth Without Youth” the Mircea Eliade novella filmed by Francis Ford Coppola, and “Modigliani” about the early Impressionist (sort of) movement -- have played into this line of thought. Freedom, but at what a price. Love, passionate and enmeshed, strangely pitting permission to be promiscuous against a lifetime total commitment. (One of the best lines in the latter movie is Modigliani demanding from Picasso, “How do you make love to a cube, eh?”) Mostly, I’m finding exploration, even atavism, as these figures grapple with the industrial era. Monkey’s paw stuff. You can’t reform something without analyzing it, but that may disperse its ability to save or be saved.

Maybe it’s our understanding of ourselves as technologically freed from industrial stuff, but then our inevitable collision and recapture. Barrus and the Cinematheque crew seem to work on this edge. A living, beautiful boy of flesh is wrapped in industrial plastic sheeting, secured with wire so only his feet can be seen. In an essay the boy Ballard witnesses a Chinese man being killed by the Japanese slowly winding him against a pole with wire, tightly enough to kill him gradually by suffocation.

Ballard’s unifying theme for his sequel to “Empire of the Sun” is called “The Kindness of Women.” One of the women is Dr. Elizabeth Grant, whose body he dissected in a pre-med course. He details the months-long lifting away of flesh from the bones and then at the end tells how her undissected and familiar hand is bundled with those long bloodless bones, still tagged in an attempt to preserve identity, and prepared for individual cremation or burial. Would that such a sense of human individuality were preserved in remains today! Perhaps you read the ghastly accounts of body parts in coolers provided to doctors learning new surgical techniques on them at fancy resorts in between rounds of golf.

In another we-are-flesh episode, the woman in question is his wife giving birth to their third child at home with a midwife. She is in agony from her hemorrhoids being pushed out under the pressure of contractions, so Ballard makes himself useful by pushing them back in and holding her anus firmly closed until the baby has arrived. Such a gesture is so real, so normally cloaked, so practical, and so hilarious that one hardly knows how to react. There is no technology in sight except the midwife’s portable tank of anesthetic gas, which was not needed. The birth was easy.

All this funky stuff is what we seem to wrestle over. Romance is sometimes construed as all pain and mess removed, what a friend of mine calls “the Windexed world” of Disney cartoonists. But also romance is constructed as risk, torture, extreme emotions of every sort, experience with no limits. Maybe both come out of the Christian tradition: the Immaculate Conception (Gnostic) versus the Crucifixion (Manichean?). Confusing. Erasure or catharsis?

It seems to be the case that the pendulum swings back and forth from one extreme to the other (puritan against hedonism) and that the puritan impulse is aroused by danger, shortage, and bad economic times, maybe only the risk of loss rather than loss. But there is always a “saving remnant” that clings to the extravagant and possibly self-destructive courage of strong-willed individuals. In fact, at least two of my academic listservs are arguing about Everett Ruess, whose remains were recently found. A devotee of isolation in the wilderness, he had been romanticized as mystically disappearing into the desert, but now it appears that he was violently mugged by outlaws. One of the professors said frankly that he liked Ruess a lot better when he was a legend. I notice that the main promoters of the wild and risky life spend a lot of time at desks.

(I wonder whether the pop-up ads will pick up on industrial plastic sheeting and wire.)